


Senneen

by Temve



Series: Irdakverse [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, Laboratories, Race, Zabraks (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:07:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27405511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Temve/pseuds/Temve
Summary: A story of race, identity, and a cute five-year-old boy with horns accidentally blowing things up.
Series: Irdakverse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974295
Comments: 7
Kudos: 12





	Senneen

**Author's Note:**

> This is an Irdakverse prequel - and because our boy didn’t acquire the name Irdak until he woke up in the Jedi Temple at the age of roughly eighteen, we will call him by his childhood name in this one. 
> 
> Thank you to the QuiDooku server crowd for egging me on with this one to the point that Irdak got his own channel to Irdak about in… I suspect this will not be the last flashback to a life that actual Irdak doesn’t remember any of but which has shaped him nevertheless.
> 
> Now with art by Kurtssingh!

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” 

Arbor Industries’ newest lab technician had to look twice to see where the voice was coming from; she simply hadn’t expected to have to look his far _down_.

“I haven’t seen you around,” the small but strident voice continued. A minuscule frown sat on the kid’s forehead, framed by a set of dark eyebrows and a pair of tiny nubs on his forehead that would probably grow into proper vestigial horns eventually, to match the crown ones higher up on his head. Which, all told, were also still nubs.

“Very observant of you, young man,” she replied gently, trying her best to keep the amusement out of her voice at the earnestness in that plump little face. She estimated him to be about four or five standard years old. “I started working here this morning. That’s why I wear this ridiculous lab coat and the regulation headwrap.” She gestured expansively at the baggy attire that all but concealed her shape in a swath of supposedly near-indestructible fabric in a near-insufferable shade of pale teal.

“I know.” The small frown had deepened. “Everyone here wears those.” A pause, during which a thought flitted across the child’s mind, leaving a visible trail somewhere in those pale blue eyes. “Well, not quite everyone. Balxur doesn’t wear the head thingy but he also hasn’t got hair.”

“Nothing to get in the way of the experiments then,” the newly minted lab technician agreed with a smile. “Good for Balxur. So, what brings you here then, young man? Visiting your mom or dad who works here?”

“I live here.” Idly, she wondered if the kid’s evident Dathomiri genes had landed him with a permanent frown.

“You… what?”

“I _said_ , I live here.”

“Oooh, I see.” She raised her eyebrows comically, which didn’t get her anywhere in terms of dispelling that tiny thundercloud. “Your parents live near here and they let you run around the lab while they’re at work?” she hazarded, her own theory clearly taking her some time to digest once she had said the words out loud.

“I’m going to have to be careful with my tools, then, aren’t I?” she continued brightly. “What’s your name, young man?”

“Senneen,” the boy replied. For a second she wondered if his skin color had actually changed; he looked like a completely different person with a smile on his face, and her own lips had spread into an answering smile before he’d even finished saying his name.

“Nice name,” she replied, nodding gravely.

“It was s’posed to be ‘Seventeen’ but I couldn’t yet say that at the time. And now it’s my name. Because I made it.”

“Your parents named you ‘Seventeen’? Wow… so you have sixteen brothers and sisters?”

“Uh-uh.” The small head shook, making the fluffy mop of brown hair bounce. “I’m the only one. They never made another one.” He stood up very straight, quite possibly adding half an inch to his slight frame. “I’m the best thing that’s come out of Arbor Industries.”

“Well, nice to meet you, Senneen.” She smiled uncertainly, not knowing how to respond to that last assertion, and decided to go for the obvious. “My name’s Kakeni. You know, in case you want to find me again. I’m not sure yet which station I’m going to end up being assigned to -”

“Miss Segret? Can you come here for a second please?”

“Of course!” With a furtive wave and a last smile at the boy, Kakeni jumped up and followed the imperious-sounding voice into the small storage room adjacent to the laboratory she’d been standing in.

She found herself behind closed doors before she’d even fully pulled up the name of the other person from the recesses of her memory. _Nale. Recruiting. Right._

“This is just a helpful hint between you and me, Miss Segret, but you might want to tread carefully around the kid. He does fall under the non-fraternization policy, specifically non-fraternization with Arbor Industries’ products.”

“ _Products_?” Kakeni gaped.

Nale nodded curtly. “He’s a prototype. Original designation was Sample #17, and it kind of stuck, mostly because the Chief Scientist refused to give him a name until he was proven fully viable… at which point he was already partway into speech development. He’d picked up on the fact that’s what people were calling him, so it kind of stuck.”

“Look,” Nale said, softening her stern gaze. “We are aware that as a mostly-human child he needs some level of socialization before he’s ready to ship off for formal schooling. The Melasaton Institute takes them as young as six so we’re in a bit of a holding pattern to make sure he gets the mental stimulation his voracious little brain requires, without getting overly… attached, if you catch my drift.” She raised an eyebrow meaningfully, gesturing at Kakeni’s headwrap. “You might be at greater risk here specifically so I recommend you steer clear for a while.”

“Is he…” Kakeni had involuntarily reached up to check her headwrap and make sure that neither hair nor horn were poking out unduly.

“Four Mothers strain, yes. And an undisclosed human male. We worked hard on this one, and he’s almost ready to ship off for formal schooling so… try to stay out of his last few months if you can please?”

Kakeni nodded mutely, the frown between her own brows more than matching the kid’s.

***

“Why do you have these things on your face?”

Kakeni couldn’t help the smile that crept onto her features at the sight of half a face popping up over the top of her tiled lab bench. Someone had clearly made an attempt at combing the boy’s hair at some point in the last day or so, and either given up when faced with the crown of stubby horns or simply had their diligent work destroyed by the small hand that was currently pointing at Kakeni’s cheek.

“Nobody else here has those,” the boy continued, his fingers tracing nonexistent lines down his own smooth pale cheeks.

“Everyone in my family does,” Kakeni replied after checking that she wasn’t about to be told off for interacting with the ‘product’. “We write them into our skin when we grow up, as a sign of who we are. You might have a set too one day.” She leaned in low, chin almost resting on the workbench, eye to eye with Senneen’s quizzical gaze. “I mean, I’m pretty sure your mothers did.”

“You’re wrong.” There was that tiny thundercloud frown again. “I have no mothers, I got built here by the wizards downstairs. Besides, nobody here looks like me so don’t tell me stuff about moth-”

He utterly failed to finish his little tirade as Kakeni conspiratorially lifted her regulation headwrap a tiny bit to show one of her horns. “You’d be surprised, young man.”

Seneen’s eyes had easily doubled in size, and his mouth stood open for a second or two before splitting in a wide grin. 

“Do… do they know?” Kakeni had to suppress a chuckle at the overexcited, overly loud whisper.

“Yes, they do,” she confirmed. “It’s not like I can hide my clan tattoos exactly. It’s hard though, looking different from everyone else. Back home, everyone looks like me. Like us.” She cast another careful glance around the lab, as if to make sure that nobody except the droids was in earshot. “Here, if you’re anything but purebred human they look down on you like you’re a lesser being. I was lucky to get this tech job to be honest, even though I have enough in my head to start as a scientist. But with these lines _on_ my head…. Some people find it hard to see past them. To what’s in my head.”

“Your mother looks like that too?” She wasn’t sure the kid had fully grasped what she was saying, and really, she couldn’t blame him. Also, not fraternizing with the ‘product’ probably included not introducing the ‘product’ to the concept of race and general human bigotry.

She dug up a soft laugh from her bosom. “Yes she does. Actually… wait a minute.”

She went to the cabinet closest to the door and rummaged around in its depths for a few moments. When she came up holding what she’d been looking for, Senneen had parked himself on the swivel stool right next to her, expectantly.

“Here. That’s my mom. And me, obviously.”

Senneen’s eyes went wide. The small flatpic showed two delicately tattooed Iridonian women grinning broadly into the camera, distinguishable only by their differing hair color and length and the slightly personalized traditional jewelry they were both sporting.

“This was when my big brother got married,” she said with a soft laugh, as if the memory was a pleasure to even touch upon. “That’s why we’re all dolled up.”

Senneen’s fingers reverently touched the glossy surface of the picture, as if trying to feel the texture of Kakeni’s hair in its short neat dreadlocks, a mass of almost perfect black broken only by the shine of hair oil and the occasional metal bead. His eyes darted up to her headwrap and back to the picture, as if trying to reconcile the fact that there was this much hair on her head with the fact that none of it was available for him to touch. 

In the picture, she was also wearing a teardrop-shaped red jewel hanging from a short chain looped around her two central horns. And the tips of all of her horns had been daubed with something shimmering and red.

“You are so beautiful,” the boy whispered, awed. He blinked a few times as if to absorb the image into his memory. 

“Do you think I can pick you to be my mother?”

***

“Senneen. Kid. Shush. Stop that!”

It took several repeats of the above to make himself heard over the din of the cacophonous ‘music’ the boy was evidently attempting to coax out of various more or less available pieces of lab glassware, but Antor Alil kept trying. Not least because getting through to the kid was the only way to get him to move his tiny butt to another lab, hopefully to annoy another hapless adult.

The clinking and clanging stopped for a second, and a small horned frown turned around at Antor. The noise, alas, was replaced by one that was even worse for his poor nerves: the kid was sucking on a piece of hard candy.

He had evidently not yet mastered the art of doing so with his mouth closed.

Screwing his eyes shut and drawing in a deep breath of the dry lab air, Antor decided that it was finally time for the emergency protocol he had dutifully kept stashed away in the recesses of his mind. Unfortunately for him, it involved _interacting_ with the child. On the upside, it may lead to a decisive drop in the frequency of these interactions going forward. Potentially until the child was finally ready to leave for boarding school.

It was time to give the boy a bit of a scare.

“You don’t know where that’s been,” Antor declared imperiously, whisking away the various bits of glassware and spare stirring rods that Senneen had assembled into an impromptu percussion instrument. “Any of those matte spots could be dangerous enough to eat through your skin, kid. We keep scary stuff in these bottles, you know?”

When Antor was sure he had the full attention of those bright blue eyes, he lowered his voice to a whisper.

“Stuff you shouldn't even be in the same room as. We keep snake water in this place.”

“Snake water?” Seneen blinked reverently.

“Snake water,” Antor confirmed. “It can turn nice things into scary snakes. Like… say, the piece of candy you’re eating.”

Seneen snapped his mouth shut protectively but couldn’t help it as his little lips parted again in astonishment. _He can turn candy into snakes?_

“Come on, spit it out.” A second later, Antor regretted not taking the detour to the other end of the lab for the tweezers as he found himself with a very sticky piece of candy adhered to his thumb. He gingerly placed it on a concave substrate holder, then wiped his hand on his lab coat with an expression of barely concealed disgust. 

“Here comes the snake water. Watch and tremble.” He reached for a glass-stoppered bottle in the back of the fume cupboard and gave the contents a theatrical little swirl before unstoppering it and letting a small amount of the oily liquid pour onto the waiting piece of candy.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the piece of candy turned into a snake. Smoke rose from the convex glass as the innocent sticky sweet twisted and expanded into a bubbling blackened mass that grew rapidly upwards before overbalancing and falling over. It continued to wriggle on the trembling glass and even managed to crawl off it onto the much-abused tile of the fume cupboard’s floor, its eyeless face staring at Senneen.

Senneen stared back, suitably awed.

Later that day, when the adrenaline had worn off and Antor was safely back at work in his once again child-free lab, Senneen allowed himself to poke at the memory, replaying the awesome experience in his mind, a broad grin spreading across his features. 

The smell of burnt sugar had been delicious. And now he knew about snake water.

***

Antor made it easy, always leaving the moment his shift was up, long before the place itself was locked down for the night. Of course he locked away his materials, more out of disdain for the cleaning crew than out of concern that anything untoward would happen to them. 

A bottle of concentrated acid in the back of the fume cupboard was evidently considered safely out of reach of a child whose horns barely topped the lip of the window at the front.

A child who, over the first five years of his life, had become an expert swivel stool jockey.

Cackling softly to himself, Senneen deposited the pocketful of candy he’d brought on top of the stool, climbed on himself, and pushed off. With a sound that could only be described as ‘squee’, he let himself be spun around until the stool jerked to a halt at its maximum elevation. Grinning, the boy scooped up the candy from between his legs, unwrapped each piece and carefully stacked it inside the fume cupboard.

When the small pile was arranged to his satisfaction, he pushed himself up to stand precariously, then all but crawled inside the fume cupboard through the front window. He had memorized the position of the snake water bottle, which was helpful since his reading skills were a little unreliable still. He was fairly certain none of the large heavy bottles arranged in the back of the fume cupboard said “snake water” on them, but that was to be expected. Adults in the lab, in his experience, liked to make things difficult when talking to each other about their work.

He thought he could make out the word ‘acid’ on the label of the bottle he remembered. Combined with the bright orange warning label depicting a hand being eaten by a series of black droplets, Senneen was satisfied that he had found the correct ingredient.

He was going to breed candy snakes.

The bottle was heavy enough that he opted to not lift it up entirely once unstoppered. Instead, he tilted it sideways until it appeared poised to empty some of its precious content onto the waiting pyre of candy.

Senneen wrinkled his nose a little. He hadn’t remembered the snake water smelling quite so bad. Then again, it would make sense that snake water felt like there was a snake biting the inside of your nose, and he’d probably just been standing back a little more when Antor had first demonstrated it .

It was definitely oily, and it smoked a little coming out of the bottle. 

When it hit the candy, it smoked even more, a dense russet cloud enveloping the birthplace of his snakes. And then the world became very loud and tilted sideways.

He blinked for several seconds, trying to get his eyes to cooperate and show him anything other than blinding, burning white. They didn’t. His face hurt, and he could feel warm tears streaming down his cheeks. Through the ringing in his ears, he thought he heard voices.

The one thing he was sure of was that there was a pair of hands picking him up bodily and pulling him up. Huh. So he had been on the floor.

Seeing still wasn’t working very well, but he thought he could hear the voice of the person carrying him, shouting in agitation at someone else somewhere else.

His ears and eyes may not be cooperating but his skin was. A pair of strong arms held him crushed against a chest with two distinct heartbeats.

“Kakeni…” he croaked, his voice feeling like glass-paper in his throat. He coughed, and felt his friend’s warm hand wiping at the mess that was coming out of his mouth, warm and runny like the mess that was coming out of his eyes.

“Stay with me, Senneen. You’ll be all right. You took a bit of a fall, so most of the blast went right over your head,” she said. “Can you see me?”

“I… I think so.” He blinked a few more times. His eyes burned, and they teared like his body wanted to pour out its innards through his abused eye sockets, but he did see a familiar shape of teal headwrap and a smile edged in delicate tattooed lines. “You’re beautiful.”

Kakeni snorted and shook her head. Of all the things for an injured child to say, that was the last one she had expected. And while she was aware that that may well be the shock talking, it served to reassure her that at the very least, Senneen’s brain was still functional, as were his eyes. And his irrepressible nature.

She smiled at him indulgently, cradling him against the jostling of her steps as she continued to rush towards the laboratory’s medbay.

“You’re not looking too bad yourself, Senneen. Between the soot streaks from the explosion and the tear streaks… and the snot… you’re giving a creditable impression of Zabrak facial tattoos. Though I suspect that wasn’t the purpose of this little endeavor, was it?”

Seneen shook his head, barely perceptibly. “Wanted snakes,” he said meekly.

“Of course you did. Well, with a bit of rotten luck you might come away with a set of dashing scars, young man. Otherwise I suggest meeting me after hours once you’ve recovered… and been released from being grounded, oh, forever probably… so we can recreate this look with slightly safer methods.” She knew her thoughts and words were jumbled, but she knew even more that she needed to keep the kid engaged and conscious at least until they got to the medbay.

“You’ll paint my face?” the small voice said, and streaming blue eyes opened wide.

“Promise.”

Small strong arms tightened around her. Senneen’s response was muffled against her chest but she heard it loud and clear, as if he’d spoken directly to her hearts.

“If you can’t be my mother, Kakeni, please wait until I’m all grown up? Because… I wanna marry you.”


End file.
